Common Challenges Faced During Sage 200 Implementation and How to Overcome Them

Implementing a new piece of software isn’t something that happens overnight.

You can never rule out obstacles – but how you deal with them affects the fluidity of your implementation. It can mean the difference between a smooth implementation and a bumpier one that takes far longer.

As a company with a decade’s experience of helping customers switch to Sage 200, we’ve seen our fair share of implementation challenges. It’s with that knowledge that we bring you today’s article. In it, we’ll cover some of the most common challenges during a Sage 200 implementation, and how you can work proactively to withstand them.

Understanding Sage 200 Implementation

Before we dive into the specific challenges, it’s important to note that every company’s implementation of Sage 200 will be unique. The challenges will be dictated by many things, including your IT setup, the amount of data on your system, and what exactly you’re looking for Sage 200 to do (i.e. what modules your implementation includes).

As such, the challenges mentioned in this article might not be ones you come up against in your own implementation. Your first call for those issues should always be the team you’re working with.

Common Challenges Encountered

Lack of Clear Goals & Scope

If you’re trying to do a Sage 200 implementation on your own, there’s a temptation to get things across the line quickly. Your team’s everyday work doesn’t stop, so it’s only natural you’d want to get back to ‘business as usual’.

This is understandable, but speed can mean you start the project without a clear understanding of what it will involve. What’s more, it often means you don’t know when your job is actually complete. This obviously makes things difficult at the beginning – and not only for the people doing the implementation. If the goals aren’t clear to the rest of your organisation, you risk a lack of buy-in from employees. That’s an issue in itself.

It’s part of why Sage recommends working with its accredited Business Partners like us. One of the things we’ll do straight away is writing up a clear project scope. This means you know exactly what your project will and won’t cover.

Resistance to Change from Employees

Here’s a universal truth: humans don’t like change. As American author John C. Maxwell pointed out, “they revolt against it unless they can clearly see the advantage it brings.”

This makes sense in the context of accounting software. Unless you could see how it would improve your job, why would you want to change from software you already knew?

As much as you can, make sure discussions about the change – what will happen and when – involve everyone who’s going to be using the new software. Encourage them to ask questions and keep them in a visible record. Whether this is in a Teams channel or on a good old fashioned whiteboard, it validates their concerns, and shows that you’re taking their views into account at each stage of the process.

Integration complexities with existing systems

Depending on the size of your business, you might need Sage 200 to work with other systems you already have. Though Sage 200 does integrate with various software out of the box, that doesn’t cover every programme. Again, this is something a Business Partner can help with, by bringing in their own trusted solutions to bridge the gap – as is the case with us and our APIs, WIRE and MRGE.

Data Migration Issues

When we see people looking to move to Sage 200, they’ve often been using their previous software for a while (sometimes over 10 years!). This means lots of data. Moving it across can be a task – not to mention how long it can take to make sure it’s still relevant and ‘clean’…

But there’s no getting around it – if you want to set up on a new system, this has to be done.

Some software, like Sage 50, has a standard migration utility bringing all of your data seamlessly across to Sage 200. This is also something Business Partners can help with – handling the extraction and import, so you don’t have to rekey every piece of static data.

So, to go back to what we said at the start – no, software implementation can’t be done in a day. But hopefully we’ve shown that some of the most common challenges with Sage 200 implementation can be avoided with a bit of forward planning, or some expert help if you need it.

Don’t navigate the challenges of Sage 200 implementation alone. With years of experience helping customers migrate, let us be your guide.

Contact us today – call 01332 959 008, or use the enquiry form.